The Devil Writes Fiction

Don’t let anyone tell you what a story is.

In his 1993 essay, “E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction,” David Foster Wallace wrote:

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things.

Because I’m too naive to know better, I’ll say this was a death toll for postmodernism and a birthing pang of metamodernism—which is postmodernism plus modernism, with part of that plus being sincerity.

If you haven’t heard of metamodernism, that’s okay. One hasn’t replaced the other. Postmodernism was built on modernism and metamodernism was built on both.

Modernism broke from traditional styles and forms and focused on modern life, alienation, and the fragmentation felt by people in a time of turmoil and change.

Postmodernism is said to be a reaction to and against modernism, but it isn’t fully separate from it, with many of its principle characteristics reflecting the modernist classic, Ulysses by James Joyce, namely a diverse, fragmented narrative; structure, and style that relies heavily on intertextuality; and pastiche.

Metamodernism dumps fragmentation and reclaims hope. Where postmodernism deconstructed the old narratives, metamodernism seeks to reconstruct them and find new meaning. It uses a hybridization of approaches from various forms and genres.

Fan fiction is a metamodern construct.

Across all these eras and categories, every attempt at style has been in debt to modernism, modifying what the modernists pioneered without fully rejecting it, and yet modernism couldn’t replace romanticism which gave life to genre fiction just as modernism birthed literary fiction. From romanticism, genre gained its focus on the imagination, individualism, and heroism. Genre carries over its traditional structures and narratives, and the genres themselves, from science fiction to mysteries to fantasy, find their beginnings in that era.

All of that history culminates in each of us and the fiction we write.

A scene from the film, The Devil Wears Prada, springs to mind. Meryl Streep explains to Anne Hathaway how fashion works and about all the decisions that were made before Anne ever pulled that top off the rack. We think we’re dressing ourselves of our own free will, but Streep’s Miranda Priestly says otherwise. In the same vein, we think we’re choosing our stories and styles of our own free will, but history conspired to give us the palette from which we paint—unless we’re genius enough to imagine a new color.

As writers, our journey mirrors that of Hathaway’s character, Andy Sachs. We might think we work outside of or even above all these “meaningless” terms, until one day we realize that this is just the way we talk about the history that defines us. Andy learned to dress well. We can learn to write well by understanding the options available to us, where they come from, and how they might best be employed.

But once we decide to employ techniques beyond our norm, how do we know which to use? There are many answers, and in the beginning, we play and we imitate, trying styles that look like fun or which were used by people we admire. As we graduate to a more mature usage, I suspect our reasons narrow.

In his BAFTA speech, Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman said:

When I first started to work in series television I didn’t need to take a course in how to write a half hour comedy. I knew what to do because I had been raised as a consumer of TV series. I understood the rhythms, I understood the types of jokes that were acceptable, I understood the stock characters. And of course all of this was in service of the perpetuation of the same consumer culture that trained me and made me desire to be part of it. I was a zombie.

I suggest this is where we begin, studiously mirroring the industry we want to join or lovingly imitating the stories with which we grew up. Is there a better option?

In that same speech, he goes on to say, “I think you need to be willing to be naked when you do anything creatively… that’s really what you have to do because otherwise it’s very hard to separate it from marketing.”

Now here’s the tricky part. I love Kaufman’s work. I want to be both him and David Lynch, but David Lynch is also important to Kaufman, and Kaufman doesn’t want to be David Lynch. He wants to do his own thing and be his own person.

I’ve looked for the quote but can’t find it, and I’m only pretty sure Kaufman was the one to say it. He writes weird stories, but he isn’t trying to be weird. He’s just looking for the best way to tell the story he wants to tell.

Kaufman isn’t even trying to sound like Kaufman. He says:

I always try to do something that I don’t know how to do and I always try to do something different but I’m a person with a very specific existence and a very specific background, like everybody is.

And the stuff that comes out of me might resemble other things that have come out of me, but I don’t try for that. In fact, I try for the opposite.

So we have all this history with all its tradition and experimentation, all these options, and the best way to tell a story is with whatever best tells the story. To hear Kaufman tell it, the best story to tell is the one that leaves us naked on the page. Hemingway said we need to bleed upon the page.

I thought we were supposed to use words.

What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity, I will be moved.

—Charlie Kaufman

All of history culminates with you so you can sit down and offer yourself as truly as possible.

What about imagining a new color for that palette? What about being a real literary rebel, as David Foster Wallace put it? What DFW recognized was the way experimentation was made to better capture life as those writers knew it; how that experimentation became a tradition; and how that tradition no longer captured the life experience of the time.

Are the traditions in which you write allowing you to bleed upon the page? Can you follow that path and still, as Hemingway said, write the truest sentence that you know?

If not, consider the tools you aren’t using, consider the traditions you’ve missed, and if those won’t let you be honest and vulnerable in your writing—

—do what you must to write one true sentence.

— Thaddeus Thomas

See all the essays in the series. Prose Style: Table of Contents.